This is a great article by Graham Moore, the Academy Award nominated screenwriter of ‘The Imitation Game':

[A]fter our scientist has finished, the camera turns to a second character. This would be our scientist’s normal-dude buddy. He’s just a regular Joe. He is the audience’s stand-in during the scene, and the character with whom the audience most identifies. This guy makes an incredulous face in response to the scientist’s technical language. And then he says the following line:

“WHOA, Doc. Say that again in English!”

You know exactly what I’m talking about. You’ve seen this moment on screen, you’ve seen it on TV, you’ve read it in novels. I find this moment to be extremely condescending to its audience. The moment essentially signals to the viewer that all of that mumbo-jumbo that this smarty pants has been blathering on about, well, we filmmakers do not understand a word of it. Moreover, we don’t care to. And we have no interest in your understanding it either.

Graham walks through how he avoided this in his screenplay about genius mathematicians, with examples from Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes works. It’s clever, you’ll recognise it, and it doesn’t condescend to your audience.

The Literary Hatchet publishes contemporary short fiction, poetry, humor, interviews and reviews by established and emerging writers and artists from around the world. Subjects range from mystery, murder, macabre, horror, monsters, ghosts, and things that go bump in the night.

For work between 1,000 and 6,000 Words they pay $10.00 USD, and $5 USD for poetry.

As Literarium rolls towards its closed beta release (you can still sign up on the home page to receive early access invites) I’m starting to enter markets directly into the directory. This makes my Monday Market post a lot easier to construct! Hooray! I may even start posting a new market every two weeks once I don’t have to source everything myself.

So, having said that, have look at today’s offering. Meerkat Press has an interesting new project up:

Love Hurts, our next themed anthology, is open for submissions. We want you to dazzle us with your science fiction and fantasy love stories, and please, make it hurt! Is your mc’s boyfriend the kind of guy you can’t take home to dinner … because he’s an alien? Is a relationship challenged because the heavy petting always draws blood? Bring us your steampunk love triangles, your dystopian cheating scandals, your interspecies relationships, your intergalactic dating war stories. We also like the usual vamps, zombies, and shapeshifters, but the story better be really imaginative (or so well-written that we insist on reading it out loud to anyone who will listen).

They’re looking for 1,000 to 5,000 words and paying from 1 to 4 USD cents/word. April 30 deadline, so start your submitting engines.

tl;dr: Living is expensive, and writing doesn’t make much money, and writers don’t often acknowledge that they rely on external funding:

I attended a packed reading (I’m talking 300+ people) about a year and a half ago. The author was very well-known, a magnificent nonfictionist who has, deservedly, won several big awards. He also happens to be the heir to a mammoth fortune. Mega-millions. In other words he’s a man who has never had to work one job, much less two. He has several children; I know, because they were at the reading with him, all lined up. I heard someone say they were all traveling with him, plus two nannies, on his worldwide tour.

None of this takes away from his brilliance. Yet, when an audience member — young, wide-eyed, clearly not clued in — rose to ask him how he’d managed to spend 10 years writing his current masterpiece — What had he done to sustain himself and his family during that time? — he told her in a serious tone that it had been tough but he’d written a number of magazine articles to get by. I heard a titter pass through the half of the audience that knew the truth. But the author, impassive, moved on and left this woman thinking he’d supported his Manhattan life for a decade with a handful of pieces in the Nation and Salon.

Not sure how long this has been around but it’s pretty slick. I’ve actually been wanting to write something similar to this (it’s really hard, don’t even try) and as you can see the folks at Pro Writing Aid have knocked it out of the park. The only drawback: no plug in support for Mac Word (the reason for that being Mac Word’s fault, not Pro Writing Aid’s).

ProWritingAid is your free online writing editor and personal writing coach. Of course it checks your grammar but it does much more to help you improve your writing: